What Drones and Crop Dusters Can Teach About Minimum Viable Product

Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies.

Awhile back I wrote about Ashwin, one of my ex-students who wanted to raise a seed round to build Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) with a hyper-spectral camera and fly it over farm fields collecting hyper-spectral images. These images, when processed with his company’s proprietary algorithms, would be able to tell farmers how healthy their plants were, whether there were diseases or bugs, whether there was enough fertilizer, and enough water.

(When computers, GPS and measurement meet farming, the category is called “precision agriculture.” I see at least one or two startup teams a year in this space.)

Precision agriculture in practice. Image via Steve Blank.

At the time I pointed out to Ashwin that his minimum viable product was actionable data to farmers and not the drone. I suggested that to validate the minimum viable product it would be much cheaper to rent a camera and plane or helicopter, and fly over the farmers field, hand process the data and see if that’s the information farmers would pay for. And that they could do that in a day or two, for a tenth of the money they were looking for.

Fast forward a few months and Ashwin and I had coffee to go over what his company Ceres Imaging had learned. I wondered if he was still in the drone business, and if not, what had become the current minimum viable product.

It was one of those great meetings where all I could do was smile: Ashwin and the Ceres team had learned something that was impossible to know from inside their building.

Crop Dusters

Even though the Ceres Imaging founders initially wanted to build drones, talking to potential customers convinced them that as I predicted, the farmers couldn’t care less how the company acquired the data. But the farmers told them something that they (nor I) had never even considered - crop dusters (or “aerial applicators”) fly over farm fields all the time (to spray pesticides.)

They found that there are ~2,400 of these aerial applicator businesses in the U.S. with ~5,000 planes. Ashwin said their big “aha moment” was when they realized that they could use these crop dusting planes to mount their hyperspectral cameras on. This is a big idea. They didn’t need drones at all.

Local crop dusters meant they could hire existing planes and simply attach their hyperspectral camera to any crop dusting plane. This meant that Ceres didn’t need to build an aerial infrastructure – it already existed. All of sudden what was an additional engineering and development effort now became a small, variable cost. As a bonus it meant the 1,400 aerial applicator companies could be a potential distribution channel partner.

The Ceres Imaging minimum viable product was now an imaging system on a crop-dusting plane generating data for high value Tree Crops. Their proprietary value proposition wasn’t the plane or camera, but the specialized algorithms to accurately monitor water and fertilizer. Brilliant.

I asked Ashwin how they figured all this out. His reply, “You taught us that there were no facts inside our building. So we’ve learned to live with our customers. We’re now piloting our application with Tree Farmers in California and working with crop specialists at U.C. Davis. We think we have a real business.”

It was a fun coffee.

Lessons Learned

Build continuous customer discovery into your company DNA

An MVP eliminates parts of your business model that create complexity

Focus on what provides immediate value for Earlyvangelists

Add complexity (and additional value) later

Steve Blank is an adjunct professor at Stanford University, a senior fellow at Columbia University, and a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been either a cofounder or an early employee at eight high-tech start-ups, and he helped start the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps and the Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Diplomacy programs. He blogs at www.steveblank.com.